Tom Foremski offers an important set of thoughts on a burning question for new media in his post today "Cherry Picking Advertising and Not Paying For the Journalism" The core question of Tom's post is, who will pay for a free, independent, objective, high quality news media in an age where advertisers spend their money with third parties like Google and Craigslist? In a media where the edges are monetized, what will lie in the center and where will it come from?
I reject part of Tom's hypothesis in which he states that amateur journalists are by definition amateurish. I do not subscribe to the theory (closely held by journalists) that only journalists know how to report. In fact, I think that mainstream media (MSM) has proven countless times that their "professional" ranks are full of amateurs. And there is increasing evidence from the blogosphere that high quality reporting can be done by people whose jobe title and training are not "journalist."
But the broader question is still valid. Aside from who will do journalism, who will pay for journalism. f course, depending upon the kind of journalism the answer is easy. The hardest category to address is political journalism, or journaism which is challenging the establishment (whether business or government) since those entities are powerful and would prefer not to have this kind of journalism occur anyway.
I have been thinking about this a lot and reading a very good book by Stephen Mitchell -- The History of News. One of the interesting insights is that the thing we all call "old media" is very new -- sure, it has been around for most of the industrial age. But the media was a very different animal in pre-industrial times (that is, for most of human history).
Before we had an "independent" and "objective" media we had partisans paying for journalism. Economic partisans paid to find out things important to their businesses (did the spice ship sink on the way back from India?) and political partisans paid to influence social perceptions and thus events. Of course there were also the minstrels who sung of anything entertaining and were given dinner and a little change for their efforts.
Having grown up with a free, independent, objective media I have come to assume that this is valuable and important to upholding our democracy. But my experience of the media's inability to challenge the current administration in Washington points to the flaw in that thinking. Perhaps a more partisan press would actually be a benefit to society.
And whether we like it or now, with the demise of mass advertising, it looks like we will see the demise of mass media, and with it the economic motivation to produce an "objective" news product. We may come to expect news in the future to be subsidized by those that have an opinion they wish to present.
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